


A Lifetime Of History

by Eilinelithil



Series: Lover's Leap [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Au-gust, Explicit Language, F/M, fairy curse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:15:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25789438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eilinelithil/pseuds/Eilinelithil
Summary: Rumplestiltskin finds himself having to live through many centuries until the Fairy curse sends Belle his way, but how will he get her to recognize him, and what wrong must they right before being allowed passage home?
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Series: Lover's Leap [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863370
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	A Lifetime Of History

**Author's Note:**

> The 2nd of the AU-gust stories. The prompt was College, and in addition, from Reedsy (again), 'someone that has lived hundreds of years goes to teach history at a high school/college.'

The hushed whispers of the students drew her eyes to the figure making his way from the parking lot to the building.

She’d heard the rumors. Everyone had, of course, he was, kind of, the school’s celebrity when it came to teachers. He didn’t _look_ that old - the various tales placed him anywhere between six hundred and a thousand years old - but his hair was peppered with gray in its long strands, and he walked with a limp, and a cane.

She didn’t believe a word of them, and nor did she care about much about history; at least, that’s what she tried to tell herself.

* * *

The students’ whispers - not hushed enough to escape his notice - followed him from his car, all the way into the Department of History.

He sighed softly and closing doors shut them out, welcoming the cool air, and the slightly musty smell of the building’s interior. It put him in mind of old libraries, or ancient scrolls. Strangely of home - though he couldn’t remember where that was - and reaching his office, he unlocked the door, made his way to his desk and immediately pulled out the sheaf of papers on which were the details of his students for the semester, skimming his eyes over names and previous grades. One in particular stood out.

He would be sure to call her to his office after the lecture.

* * *

There wasn’t a warning, except for the fact that Rumplestiltskin had been missing for almost a week before she began to suspect the foul play of the fairy curse being behind it. Belle began a search of the castle from top to bottom, a feat that took some time, searching for anything out of the ordinary, any strange piece of furniture, an item out of place, anything that could be where Rumple was trapped this time.

She found nothing, and instead returned to her now accustomed place beside the fire. She watched the flames. It seemed to help her calm her mind enough for her to think. What _wrong_ could there be for him to right, and where or when - since his first quest, as she liked to call it, had been to save the first half of the 20th century in a world without real magic from the insane machinations of a man that called himself The Beast, and was a famous occultist in his time.

In the end, her eyes kept being drawn from the fire in the grate to the amber goblet on the mantle piece, and learning to trust her intuition, Belle got up, placed her fingertips on the flared base of the stem, and quietly called his name three times.

* * *

For Rumplestiltskin, it had been equally as sudden, but in the same breath had taken an eternity. One moment he had been in the midst of apparating to the object of his next deal, the next he was flat on his face, on a dry and dusty, dirt floor, in a land - he soon discovered - without magic.

For a long time, he lay there, his heart pounding, one word - one _name_ \- echoing in his mind. “Baelfire” but as his heart slowed, he realized there was no way that _fairy_ magic would have - even inadvertently - helped him to reunite with his son.

As the years passed, a slow march of time through which he lived - alone and friendless - he came to realize that more and more. Through the eleventh century he watched the rise and fall of native tribes, and in the twelfth the same. He became both revered as an ‘ancestor’ and reviled as an evil spirit through the hundreds of years that followed. He came from the shadows, the deal maker as others came to build new homes and drive the native folks away. Drawn to the slowly forming centers of learning, he helped to build the institutions, and his own reputation as a master, and a scholar of history.

He reveled in revolution and war, coming out on top and with great wealth, but always drawn back to those institutions of learning. This was his place, he was _sure_ of it, and so he settled, and began to look for Belle.

With the passing of several hundred more years, he began to worry that he had missed her in the null time, the years there had been nothing but dirt and sky, and men he could not understand, and he began to despair of ever finding a way back to the Enchanted Forest, and in despair began to forget himself, and Belle, and everything that had mattered…

…except Baelfire.

That one thread upon the web in which he was trapped became the one thing standing between him and utter ruination, the thought that - if whatever was supposed to be happening, whatever that might have been, never happened, at least he would, eventually, find Bae.

When he became a tenured professor in a prestigious British University, he became Dillon - he who waits.

* * *

“…skin!”

She stumbled, her head spinning for a moment and she leaned on… whatever it was that was in front of her while she tried to catch her bearings. Looking up as her eyes focused, she saw a stranger in the mirror.

She was dark haired - so dark a brown that it was almost black, with green eyes, that were currently red rimmed and being dabbed at with some damp tissue to blot the make up that had run with her tears. She looked like some kind of absurd clown.

Clown she wasn’t, however, so she searched in the large purse she carried slung over her shoulder for some kind of identification, and she found two things that immediately shocked her so much that the tears that were still involuntarily falling from her eyes stopped at once - much to Belle’s relief - and secondly, made her heart leap up into her throat.

Her name was Aileen Henderson, and she was studying, according to her identification card, at Cambridge University. Somehow, Belle presumed from the knowledge the person whose body she was currently occupying held, she knew that was highly unusual in this particular period in time, but what shocked her the most was the second thing that she had found in the purse.

A sheaf of paper that looked as though it had been folded over savagely opened out to into a very neatly written essay. Most troubling was the crablike crawl of red ink all across the first page, and the large red letter F that was printed, as though with relish, across the top of the first few lines.

This couldn’t be happening. Without a pass on this assignment, it would all be for nothing. She _wouldn’t_ be awarded the degree for which she had so diligently studied and had argued for with such vigor.

“Damn him, then!” she said rather loudly in the echoing bathroom, and clapped a hand over her mouth for uttering such foulness, and as a lady too. If her previous professor wouldn’t give her the credit she was so sure she deserved, then his replacement would. She would make certain of it.

Taking a deep breath, and blotting at her eyes one last time, Belle-that-was-Eileen left the bathroom, head held high, ignoring all the sideways glances and whispered comments that passed back and forth between the other students. Most of them were male, but there were the odd females here and there, and they were the worst.

She ignored them all, and marched, essay in hand to Professor Dillon’s office, and knocked once before throwing open the door entirely without invitation.

The professor looked up as she did, and seemed about to protest the intrusion. She didn’t give him the chance.

* * *

“Your predecessor failed my essay,” she snapped. “I’d like a second opinion.”

He sat back in his chair, looking her up and down several times over. He even almost indolently set his crossed ankles on the corner of the desk and folded his arms across his chest.

“Would you indeed?” he purred.

As if a long neglected light had been thrown on, he _knew_ her from the first moment she burst into his office, but he couldn’t tell her, because the curse would never be broken that way. No, first he had to do whatever it was to right the wrong that had occurred here, before they could return to the Dark Castle, and safety.

“Professor Dillon,” she began in a rather combative tone, Rumple thought, “I worked hard on this assignment, perhaps _twice_ as hard as any of the others, and why? Because I’m a wo—”

“I’m certain that you did, Miss Henderson,” he said, “but a professor is bound by whether or not the evidence in your essay proves the thesis.”

“Which it does,” she snapped. “I made certain of it, and the other professor—”

“…my predecessor…’

“—failed me because I don’t have a cock and balls between my legs!”

She fell awkwardly silent then as Professor Dillon stared at her in horror, and then, without warning, began to laugh heartily, and held out his hand.

“Come on then,” he waggled, then snapped his fingers, “Let’s take a look at it.”

* * *

It wasn’t the voice, the voice was almost normal as voices went, and in any case, she was still reeling from daring to use such words as she had. She’d thought she would have been in a great deal of trouble, so when he laughed, she wasn’t sure whether to be offended or not.

But then as he gestured for the essay, there was just something _too_ familiar about it, and then about _everything_ that followed that she couldn’t _help_ but recognize him, and even as she did, she knew it wouldn’t always be that easy. In fact she suspected that it would get harder with every task they faced.

“Rumple?” she dared to whisper.

“Come on, come on, the essay!”

Her stomach flipped, and she began to worry that her intuition was wrong and it wasn’t him at all.

She’d heard the rumors. Everyone had, he was, kind of, the school’s celebrity when it came to teachers, but just because everyone _said_ he was hundreds of years old, didn’t mean that it was because he was the Dark One, and lived for an eternity.

“Oh, I um… Professor?”

“I won’t bite, dearie,” he said at last with another snap of his fingers, and Belle’s heart lurched again, this time in relief, and then playful irritation as he added, in a murmur that made her already blushing face redder still, “Not unless you want me to.”

“Rumplestiltskin!” she squeaked, and Rumplestiltskin snatched the essay from her hand and laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Eileen Henderson went on to become Lady Eileen Fox, a notable British archeologist. One can imagine that she would have needed credits in history for that. Also, she was one of the few women of her time to graduate from Cambridge University, though even as a graduate, she was not awarded her degree until well after she left its hallowed halls.


End file.
